Google veterans: The company has become ‘unrecognizable’ (opens in new tab)

It actually became an internal joke where you'd get these emails every 2-3 months saying your manager's manager's manager's manager now reports to a different manager, neither of which you'd ever met or even necessarily heard of.

To be clear, the executive team are ultimately responsible but Google has fallen prey to a lack of leadership (Eric Schmidt, we miss you) and an entrenched swarm of middle management. I honestly believe a lot of the bad ideas Google got involved in (like the DoD ML thing) sprang from over-eager VPs.

There's an old Dilbert strip basically saying that managers reach a point of constant reorgs and responsibilities churn to the point that no one is around long enough to be held accountable for their actions ("oh that was the last guy") and definitely not around long enough for anything to work.

This to me is what Google had become. The reorgs were constant and the leadership was directionless.

The transparency thing here is a big one. There was a culture of blameless and open post-mortems. This probably started to change in the Vic Google Plus era. Dashboards were locked down. There were some pretty (internally) famous examples of post-mortems people found that were subsequently restricted, essentially because they (rightly) made some VP look bad.

One of the most shocking things to me was a story from last year about how accessing such documents could retroactively lead to you being fired. As in Google docs were typically sent around such that if you had the link you could open it and these links might be forwarded to open groups. That's how a lot of things (internally) "leaked".

Disclaimer: Xoogler (6 years)

Here's the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446

While this might (and almost certainly should) hurt Google's brand, I think this issue applies to any big for-profit company. I doubt that Amazon or Apple are much different.

I've been at Google full time for 5+ years and was an intern before that. The company has more than doubled in size since I've been here, so I'm not exactly old-school but I have seen change.

When I started Google felt like one company. I was blown away that I could look at any piece of code (besides Google X and parts of Android) and file a bug against any team when something didn't work. I felt proud of other team's products and I also felt responsible for them, I filed a lot of bugs/feedback trying to make random things better.

The culture was also just fun as hell. The mailing lists and Memegen (our internal meme site) were really fun to participate in for the most part.

A lot has changed now. Each product feels more isolated and does things their own way. The company is far too big for anyone to claim they really know what's going on outside their local area. The culture is no longer fun at all. There is a lot more negativity, and a lot of it is justified (you've seen the news).

However I still love the people I work with directly and what we work on (Firebase, fwiw). And one strange positive about how large the company has gotten is that I can just focus on that. I no longer get too worked up about what's going on over in far-flung teams and that's fine with me. And I don't naively participate in company-wide forums expecting a good mood. But I get to build cool things and we have more resources (money, people, knowledge, etc) than we know what to do with.

All of that is to say that yes, a lot has changed. Some for the worse, some for the better, some just different. I still think this is a great place to work and I don't plan to leave any time soon.

Google's on its way. And it's too big to fail, except it will, and we'll be shocked at the reach of its surveillance capabilities at the fire sale.

It felt like a place where people worked on ideas they thought were cool. Things seemed to just happen organically without a lot of bureaucracy and management structure.

I think Larry changed that with a more top down approach with what to work being decided higher up, see social. This led to less project flexibility and more hierarchy, with managers and pms becoming more important in the org.

Coupled with the growth in the number of employees, I think where the company today is just a gradual evolution of what Larry started along with the problems of growth.

That said it is still a pretty good place to work at for a number of reasons.

But I see people do nothing but work. They start at 7.00. Work all day. Outsource family time. Scrounge for a little bit of self care time. Sleep little, enjoy in chunks of time once a year. All for a price.

Most of what we work for goes to the government. Yes, taxes go for betterment of society but because no one has a say in it, it can also go towards things some of us don’t believe in. War, for example. I can’t divert my tax dollars towards space exploration rather than bloody wars.

We need a formula for life and living. A formula that gives us true and lasting freedom.

[..] When Page became CEO in 2011, he became “obsessed” with reading about why companies fail from being too big and sluggish, Stapleton said. “It’s sort of sad that a lot of the things he was afraid would happen, actually happened.”

Stapleton, who held a number of roles close to the founders, recalled Page walking around offices with a chunk of metal that he said was from his grandfather’s auto plant in Michigan. It supposedly symbolized a point in time when auto workers felt like they needed to protect themselves against management. Page showed it as an example of something he hoped would never happen to Google.

“He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.”[..]

Too much dilution in vision, other priorities take center stage of a public company.

> Googlers who interviewed for roles at Oso said the company had become “too big” and bureaucratic to make a difference for workers

Well, yes of course. Your voice becomes diluted to a large degree when companies become that large. It's sad that Google has shifted away from it's previous culture, but the outcomes shouldn't be too terribly surprising.

The irony here is people point to social justice activity as the reason for decline but really all that social justice activity is a smokescreen for betraying other values. We'll do what we're bid by totalitarian regimes and then make ourselves feel better by putting rainbow colors on our logo during Pride Week.

Though I agree as far as tech brand goes Google seems to have gone down much faster than other big tech cos go.

“He always said how much Google needs to be upfront and progressive in how it handles people and processes and HR,” Stapelton recalled. “He had such an optimistic view of technology and how Google could really transform how people live and free up humanity to pursue the arts.”

Was that really her interpretation of Larry Page? No wonder she's now publicly crying her disappointment. It seems like the total opposite of the Page I saw, a man who never cared about the arts at all and in fact had to be browbeaten into caring about visual design by Steve Jobs himself.

Page back then was a man who cared deeply about science and anything sci-fi. The more sci-fi the better. His vision for Google was a machine that converted ad clicks into flying cars, the computer from Star Trek and so on. Amazing tech wasn't a means to an end but rather, the end itself. I never heard or saw anything in Google's mission about "freeing up humanity to pursue the arts". I can imagine why a humanities person like Stapleton might have wanted to believe that as it would have given her own interests and background an anchor in what was back then a supremely engineering oriented culture. But it wasn't true. Nobody gave a stuff about the arts, as evidenced by hiring priorities.

That attitude, to me, kind of explains the downfall of Google. People started to realize they could stop doing the things that made it a good place to work, and just focus on their project work. No need to do a tech talk to share with the company what you're up to. No need to clean up tech debt. No need to work with the teams whose products you consume to make them better. Just take every shortcut to launch, get promoted, and get more power. People saw that that worked better than being transparent, fixing tech debt, etc., and now THAT'S the culture. People see that working, repeat it as fact ("how to get promoted: don't fix bugs!"), and then that becomes the culture and that's where Google seems to be now. Now people think that there is nothing they can do to change the culture, and maybe that's true. There is just too much inertia and so YOU being transparent, YOU being a good steward of the codebase and shared resources, etc. just won't matter. They just get in the way of getting promoted. So people fall back to the natural human fallback of "appeal to authority". They write open letters, they have protests... but it doesn't matter. That never worked. The early engineers didn't write open letters to management about having a shared codebase, or requiring code reviews... they just did it. It is hard work, often with no reward, but over time the benefits accumulate. But when you stop putting in the work, it stops working. Now the company is too large to ever change, probably. But it got there because people were lazy about protecting the culture, and now all that cultural tech debt piles up and results in the things that we read about on HN.

Next time, when you're at a new company... realize that YOU have to set the objectives. If you want transparency, be transparent about your work. Do internal talks or write internal blog posts about what you're up to. Give curious people permission to look around and play with your service. Give people peer bonuses and write them good reviews when they do menial tasks that help code health long term. You have to make a conscious effort every single day, and remind others to do the same... or you'll just end up with another heartless megacorp that is coasting on momentum from all this work that people put in in the early days. And, you have to deal with the consequences of your positive culture. Some jerk is going to break your service that has no rate limits. Someone is going to walk off with your customer list. You're going to miss a deadline because someone was doing a big refactor instead of that last little cleanup before launch. If you really value transparency, code health, whatever, you have to accept that they are going to conflict with other things you care about! If you can't accept that, you aren't going to really have that culture that you want.

(Also, to be clear, I am not criticizing anyone mentioned in the article here. I did not work with them at Google, but they were very transparent about what they were working on, so I know exactly what they were up to at any given time. And I was also pretty transparent, so I bet they knew me despite having never worked with me. A lot of people were doing a lot of good things, and that community certainly knew each other well, even if only in passing. But there were tens of thousands of people that just existed without contributing positively to the culture, and the "carrying capacity" was reached and here we are. It is sad to see.)

Anyway, I write this because it is something that everyone will need to think about in their next (or current) adventure. You have to decide what you value, and if it's a "good culture", you will have to scrimp somewhere else to make that a reality. Nobody is going to do it for you. You have to be the "management" or "promotion committee" that enforces your values. And it will come at a cost!

Wow. And this is why those call in EAP / anonymous reporting programs offered as a 'benefit' always seem to be garbage. Never had a good experience with any of them.

> “Google is built on trust,”

They were. They don't need that anymore.

As I tried to posted it 2 days ago and I was redirected to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21923103 posted by mattydread and at that time it was [DEAD]. I started wondering why. I vouched to resurrect it and somebody else must have done it too but eventually it only got to 5 points.

I even thought for a moment that Google have bots to kill undesired articles on Hacker News but I thought I was reading too much into it.

When I noticed that this was a different post, I run a search on Algolia ( check https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... ) and apparently yesterday it was posted again by raiyu ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21932616 ) and it only collected 2 points.

Today it was posted for the 3rd time and it is finally taking off...

How did it ended up [DEAD] 2 days ago ?

Is it common that an article is posted for 3 days in a row and it is [DEAD]?

This is not an isolated Google issue. It's systemic in companies w/ a certain momentum.

As those growth rates slowed it started flailing around trying to kickstart them in other ways. It had to do this to keep the stock in the stratosphere, which kept the mid-to-senior managers rich, and gave the ones who weren't yet rich the possibility of becoming so. Some of these attempts were questionable ethically. Similarly, privacy invading changes were made in the core business. People all the way to Larry & Sergey told themselves and everyone else the same lies that their ceaseless profiling and other invasions were for the customers own good. Think G+'s real names policy, Google Glass's creepy stalker potential, etc.

The engagement in dubious if completely legal tax dodges was another sign. As was the army of lobbyists, as was the work on censored search.

In any case, it's sort of inevitable in stock-market driven capitalism that unicorns can't slow down gracefully, with everyone being satisfied that their millions or billions are 'enough.' I wish they could. I suspect it's doubly-hard for a company when their outlandish success attracts people primarily driven by money. All that growth meant a ton of hiring, and i suspect people who really just wanted to get rich self-selected into the applicant pool.

Beyond that, instances of sexual harassment and their cover-up suggests that maybe their was never a big commitment to not 'be evil'. At least when it came down to powerful execs and less-powerful women. Maybe it was always just another company.

I used to be really proud of my time at Google, and I still think it was, and probably still is, a better than the rogues gallery of tech's giant offenders (Uber, Facebook, Amazon). But the pride I felt in working there is gone.

I believe Jeff Bezos is the greatest businessman we've seen since Ford or Rockefeller, but his insatiable need for not just more, but everything, has kept him from being a great human and Amazon from being a great company in anything other than the most narrow economic sense.

A couple of people are unhappy, out of a workforce of 100000. So what?

It also mostly seems to be political reasons. I would imagine a lot of people working for Google just want to do a good job for a good salary, not make Google a vehicle for their political opinions.

I think people pushing their political agenda within a company tend to harm the company and it should therefore be ok to fire them.

That said, I haven't wanted to work for Google for years. But I am from the opposite side from these veterans. I felt it was very unjust when James Damore was fired, and I really don't want to work at a place that distrusts its workers so much that it forces them to go through diversity trainings and things like that. I would feel "unsafe" at Google.

Step 1. Start a FAANG-competitor worker-owned co-op that is profitable through donations, subscriptions and freemium products / services. No evil allowed.

Step 2. Poach more workers from FAANG to a civilized, humane and decent organization that creates excellent products for normal humans.

Step 3. Dominate FAANG without selling-out to governments privacy invasions or reselling customer data.